Long discussed, the idea of rolling phone leads into paid search comes closer to mass market reality with FindWhat’s announcement this week. From MediaPost:
Advertisers who use FindWhat.com don’t even need a Web site, because the company creates business profile pages that load when users query keywords relevant to an advertisers’ business. Yahoo!’s Overture offers LocalMatch, a product that makes a similar hosted contact page available to advertisers in its network.
When they sign up for FindWhat’s pay-per-call, advertisers provide their basic contact information–such as location, operating radius, which keywords they think are relevant to their business, and how much they’re willing to pay for each call. The minimum bid for pay-per-call is $2, according to FindWhat, a performance-based marketing technologies provider….
…FindWhat.com is the first major ad network to offer the new advertising technology, which belongs to tech firm Ingenio, Inc. The FindWhat.com partnership is a major win for Ingenio, which needs distribution if pay-per-call is going to get off the ground.
But here’s the interesting market data, for you infoporniacs:
According to local market research firm The Kelsey Group, 98 percent of the roughly 22 million businesses in the United States fall into the category of small- to-medium-sized enterprises–the precise targets for the local offerings of large ad networks like Google, Overture, and FindWhat.
Additional Kelsey data shows that small and medium-sized companies conduct most of their business locally. Eighty percent of small/medium companies make up 75 percent of their product buys and/or sales within a 50-mile radius of their business location.
Currently, only 350,000 advertisers participate in paid search worldwide. Tech providers and industry evangelists hope that the number is small because business owners don’t advertise on the Web unless they have a site; only about 30 percent of small or medium-sized businesses have a Web site, according to Kelsey.
I’d expect this kind of activity to rocket as the convergence of telecommunications & computing continues. This kind of cross-over has endless types of implimenation…
1. Directory enquiries
2. Mobile search & connect (covers local)
3. Interactive Yellow pages
4. VOIP search & connect services
Anybody providing voice services can and probably will capitalise on the above….and they will be seeking to use such models to gain entry into the “ubiquitos” advertiser auction models moving forward.
This is going to be interesting because this is the first time, that the telco’s will see a direct attack on what they view are their core revenue models (as well as VOIP directly)….expect a bloody battle or further consolidation.
Good news for the consumer though, and that whats counts.
Too long to post here, full version w/ links & credits where they’re do on my blog:
I attended The Kelsey Group’s DD:ILM (Drilling Down: Interactive Local Media) conference in Santa Clara, CA during my time with KRD, and was impressed with the caliber of the discussions (and therefore, the attendees). The show was sold out (and then some), and the buzz meter was high.
Regardless of the buzz, there was substance to be had. I walked away with a couple of key insights into the minds of SME’s with regards to local search (some confirmation of my own thinking and more importantly, some new learning). In particular:
1) PPC should stand for Pay Per Call, not Pay Per Click …
This model is a good way to lure in less web savy advertisers, but I think their implementation is flawed. The calls should probably not be toll-free, in which case ‘call fraud’ will not be a problem. The minimum bid is quite high.